Vladimir Putin?s recent visit to London for a Russia/European Union summit passed off as planned ? almost unnoticed. If the atmosphere between the Russian leader and Tony Blair, the current EU president, was not demonstrably warm, in public it was self-consciously cordial. This was an event calculated to be remarkable only for being unremarkable.

A few weeks earlier, George W. Bush offered Mr Putin a more effusive welcome. ?My friend Vladimir?, the US president said of his guest at the White House. Mr Blair spoke, in the impenetrable EU jargon, of building a new institutional relationship between Europe and Russia based on ?four common spaces?. Mr Bush simply gushed that ?every time I visit and talk with president Putin, our relationship becomes stronger?.